BOOK NO MORE MAN - INTERVIEW WITH LUCA BRUNETTI
Luca Brunetti (b. 1990, Italy) is an artist and photographer based in Rome. He graduated from La Sapienza in Digital Arts, and obtained a master’s in Photography at the Scuola Romana Di Fotografia e Cinema. He works with digital photography and different media in order to explore and understand human identity through the lens of functionalism. Since 2018 his style moved in a more experimental direction, keen to use a new language. His project “No more man” poses new questions about male sexuality and underlines the influence of pornography on the way men experience eroticism.
INSIDE OUT INTERVIEW WITH ÖZGE ERTÜRK
Özge Ertürk (1993) is a self taught photographer. Born in Istanbul and currently based in Berlin.Her work Inside Out is a personal journey that conveys an inner reality from the psyche. Unconscious feelings, memories, thoughts and urges manifest from deep inside into the daily life. This is a way to examine her own sense of perception and unconscious interactions with her surroundings. These photographs are fictional yet real moments, half staged half spontaneous, featuring individuals who play an important role in Ertürk’s theatre of life. The work aims to connect with the viewer, through the symbolic exploration of the body, face, distant moments, and transparent boundaries in atmospheric and ambiguous spaces.
Umut Erbas - There Is No Being On Earth That Has Time
Umut Erbas (1991, Turkey) deconstructs photographs, the symbols of reality and the visible world, through the use of external interference. While these transformations give way to departed remaining traces or new images, this process is concerned with demonstrating how everything, including the mind, is variational, lacerable, multilayered, and mortal. In his recent works supported by found photographs, the artist creates new narratives by representing various issues that include social memory and traumas, the phenomenon of forgetting/remembering, stacks of images, fears, historiography, sublimes of nature, and multiple realities. The artist’s production utilizes techniques such as cyanotype, darkroom, various surgical manipulations, and digital manipulations and offers a transition into dream-like, fantastic, eerie, and complex forms. He recently started creating works that support photography with video art, site-specific installations, interactive elements, and texts.
WHAT IS THE COLOUR OF MEMORY ? - INTERVIEW WITH ANDREA ROSEMERCY
Andrea Rosemercy (1983, Spain) has been working in the photographic sector for 10 years and after the time spent there, she felt it was the time for her to start a new path. When it comes to photography, she always had her eye on it but it was not until 2019 when she dedicated herself more seriously to analogue photography.
Her work operates among three constants: the exploitation of the full range of colour, the study of composition and the interpretation of emotions to generate ideas and concepts. Photography helps Rosemercy to focus on the present moment and is a great companion for channelling emotions. Her motivation to work with analogue is strengthened both by the possibilities and limitations of the film material. Rosemercy loves analogue photography for its texture and for the way it boosts her creativity.
A VISION FULL OF CONTRASTS - INTERVIEW WITH ALEXANDER DIMITRIOS PAPADOPOULOS
Alexander Dimitrios Papadopoulos (1996) had developed a practice that is rooted in the search for the origin. His dual citizenship, Greek and Italian, has informed his artistic research that is caught between eastern and western values, images, impressions. Both the mundane and the sacred are present in his works, be they filmic, photographic or mixed-media productions. Papadopoulos graduated with a Bachelor’s degree in New Technology of Arts at the Academy of Fine Arts of Venice in 2021, and in the same year has delivered his latest short film titled The Black Sun, accepted in the selection of Short Film Corner at Festival de Cannes.
MARIA SIORBIA - SEMITONES IN THE SILENCE
Maria Siorba started photographing in 2014 while still studying Fine Arts at Athene. Also having an educational background in graphic design and communication, the subjects of her work reflect on how we communicate and get inspired by the difficulties all humans encounter in expressing themselves, especially under intense emotions such as love and fear.
Raised in Southern Italy, Antonio Miucci (1994) is an Italian visual artist and fashion photographer, he lives and works in Milan. He holds a MFA in Photography and Contemporary Art, from Brera Fine Arts Academy. His research in art and photography deal with the themes of Queerness, celebrating self-expression, bravery, vulnerability, beauty, human brightness and darkness.Through the use of visual arts mixing with portrait and fashion photography, as well as the conscious use of vibrant colours, the willingness of the author is to create evocative and layered imaginaries, whose intention is to redefine the perception about gender and personal identity in contemporary society, specifically deconstructing visual and cultural stereotypes about masculinity.His works have been exhibited in Italy and abroad for several group shows and presentations (Gender Project Berlin, Paris Photo, Prix Picto de La Mode, The Curated Fridge, Palm Photo Prize 2020, Artissima & GQ Italia, Cardi Gallery, Voies Off, Triennale Design Museum, Fondazione Meravigli) and published in several international art and photography books and magazines (Der Greif, Fresh Eyes, Young Photographers from Italian Academies by Ragusa FotoFestival, Witness, GQ Italia, Rolling Stone, CAP74024, Oneg, Vogue Italia, The Collector, A Part Magazine, Kaltblut, Perimetro, Pellicola).
Sam Warnaar (b. 2000) is an autonomous Dutch Photographer who graduated in 2021 with a Bachelor's degree in Applied Photography and Visual Communication from the Nederlandse Fotovakschool Rotterdam. Capturing her fascination for the female body, she is inspired by her models who expose themselves to her, which is shown in her photographs through the recurring themes of strength through vulnerability. Her vision of working with a model is that it is always an equal exchange and that the power lies in creating together.
SEPPE VANCRAYWINKEL - WITHIN THE BUBBLE OF SURROUNDINGS
Within the bubble of surroundings grants insight into an evolving yet solid friendship in which notions of time, space, adulthood, masculinity, and intimacy are spontaneously and intuitively reconfigured in a playful manner.
Seppe Vancraywinkel (1998) states that this project is an ode to that friendship. ‘One that was forged years ago between several boys living in the countryside, surrounding the small village of Hoegaarden. The loyalty and unwithering spirit within their comradery, as well as the picturesque scenery with its plains and creeks where they are free to roam and explore.’ As Vancraywinkel and his friends grew older and left the place that once connected them, a strong desire remains to escape the hustle and bustle of the city and seek refuge in the simplicity and intimacy of their friendship.
CATALINA LAY - THE HOMING SERIES LAY
Even though Catalina Lay Gomez (1974) has a degree in sociology, she is now dedicated to art, poetry, and photography. She considers herself a world citizen, having lived all over the globe. She moved to the USA with her family, this had already been the fifth country they called home. While starting to initiate this chapter of settling, making friends, and getting familiar, COVID - 19 hit the world.
ALESSANDRO SANTI - GUARDIANS OF THE CURTAIN
Trained as an architect, Alessandro Santi (b. 1992, Italy) has always been passionate about photography. In his project “Guardians of the Curtain”, he explores how our subjective interpretation connects objects, facts and memories. The project was born out of this need to produce and tell feelings and memories through symbols, linking two concepts: the Archetype and Affordance.
SARA CUCÈ - MEMORY OF THE EYES
Sara Cucè (b. 1991, Italy) is a London-based photographer whose work explores questions of identity, representation, perception, memory, and the environment. “Memory of the eyes” is an ongoing visual diary focused on the theme of home and belonging, the concept of migration in relation to identity and therefore of space, time and memory. The work aims to represent the existential condition of the individual that migrates to a new territory, questioning where and who they belong to.
MATEJ JURCEVIC - I GET SO LONELY? A LIFE IN MAGAZINES
Matej Jurčević (b.1995, Croatia) graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts (KASKA), Antwerp in 2021 with a MA in Photography. In his artistic practice he explores themes of identity, collective memory and youth culture. He is a recipient of the VID Grant award for 2021 hosted by the VID Foundation for Photography. The award is granted to photographers exploring relevant social issues in the Balkans. In 2022 he published his first photobook: I try to take care of myself now. The book was published by Organ Vida Publishing.
PIETRO LO CASTO - TO SEARCH THE SECRET OF THE FOREST
To Search the Secret of the Forest is an ongoing project by visual artist Pietro Lo Castro (b. 1986, Italy). Working with photography and video, Lo Castro portrays a community called Tangia Basti located in the depths of a forest in Nepal. Enigmatic images of trees, crooked houses, birds and rituals, intertwine in harmony with glimpses of the everyday lives of the villagers.
![CRISTINA RIZZI GUELFI - WE NEED A FACE [?]Cristina Rizzi Guelfi's series "we need a face [?]" was born out of a considered critique of the widespread phenomenon of the selfie — the creation of which (and subsequent dissemination of) has only become …](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c1bbe5d45776e5ecdb17709/1629270977361-EFZIBQ2Q7RSLEKTZDGQH/weneedaface9.jpg)
CRISTINA RIZZI GUELFI - WE NEED A FACE [?]
Cristina Rizzi Guelfi's series "we need a face [?]" was born out of a considered critique of the widespread phenomenon of the selfie — the creation of which (and subsequent dissemination of) has only become easier and more accessible in contemporary times. The series examines the selfie as a unique storytelling tool of increasingly important relevance, in a conversational space marked by a progressively frenetic and immersive nature.
Chiara Ernandes (b. 1989, Italy) was born dead in the summer of 1989. After the intervention of doctors, intubation and cardiac massages, she was brought back to life and was born for a second time five minutes later. As she writes, her life “started from death, by contradiction”. This experience stayed latent in Chiara’s upbringing and took different meanings over time. As a dormant memory, hidden somewhere inside her body, it shaped her way of understanding and navigating the world.
With Eliška Sky's photographic project Womaneroes, one is pulled into a kaleidoscopic world of colour, texture and shapes, embodied within a tribe of female warriors, each one standing powerfully — unique in age, body type, ethnicity, personality, yet all unified in their representation of the diverse spectrum to be found in the feminine form. Sky's project moved beyond its original raison d'etre as an instigation of "visual play" to include a more contemplative exploration of the manner in which women's bodies are depicted in popular media — and how women in turn react to and internalize visual representations of femininity.
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GIACOMO INFANTINO - THOSE DREAMS THAT DO NOT WAKE UP
For many of us, there was one significant moment in which a realization hit of the strange liminality of the global pandemic: the devastation was visceral at times and distant at others, yet the reality of the situation, and the global unity of distinct people all confined to their homes, verged on implausibility. Giacomo Infantino's photographic series Those Dreams That Do Not Wake Up was born out of an exploration of this phase following the lockdown.
DANIELA CONSTANTINI - STILL LIFE
Citrus fruits, delicate daisies, vivid green savoy cabbages and slices of ripe, succulent melons, among many other things, form the rich imagery of Mexican photographer Daniela Constantini's latest photographic project, Still Life. Her photographs derive much of their stylistic qualities from the still life traditions of Western painting — in particular, those developed in the 16th and 17th centuries by the likes of Dutch Golden age painters like Pieter Claesz, as well as those in the Spanish Baroque tradition of Juan Sánchez Cotán, — yet the inclusion of female subjects, personal acquaintances of the photographer, adds an intimate dimension to her highly stylized images.
JANN HÖFER - THIS BELONGS TO YOU
Jann Höfer (b. 1986) is a freelance photographer based in Germany who works in the field of reportage, documentary, and portrait photography. By photographing all the things that remain, Höfer’s body of work focuses on portraying that what is no longer present. A strong sense of empathy gives him the opportunity to tell stories of his protagonists in the most honest way. Höfer is also interested in the notion of trauma and how it affects the self-development and ways of living.
SINKING STONE - CRISTIANO VOLK
Cristiano Volk is an Italian documentary photographer who studied at the Spazio Labo’ in Bologna and at the D.O.O.R. Academy in Rome. Though his work Volk presents a critical perspective on social political and cultural issues of our time. So far his interests circulated around the topics of tourism, a melancholia that takes shape of depression, and contemporary consumerism.
THE TRUTH IS IN THE SOIL - IOANNA SAKELLARAKI
The Greek photographer Ioanna Sakellaraki (b. 1989) describes her practice as follows: “My photographic work suggests a constructed space of fantasy and loss within the magical potential of transformation and fiction the camera allows.”
EXISTENTIAL STREET PHOTOGRAPHY - JOEP HIJWEGEN
Joep Hijwegen (b. 1994, The Netherlands) moved to the city, but he always struggled to feel at home within a mass, where each of the individuals in a crowd is seemingly concerned with their own life. It is though photography, that Hijwegen found a way to celebrate his unique way of feeling and seeing the world. The act of photographing gives him back the control while also inviting others to stand still and observe.
LERNAEAN HYDRA - INTERVIEW WITH ANARGYROS DROLAPAS
Anargyros Drolapas is a Greek photographer living in Athens. His last work ‘Lernaean Hydra’ is a symbolic exploration of depression, anxiety and the role of the subconscious in everyday life. Inspired by Greek mythology, ‘Lernaean Hydra’ is a name referring to a nine-headed water serpent associated with the underworld. She appeared to be the shadow one tried to constantly suppress. Hercules attempted to kill it by cutting her heads but as a result, multiple heads re-grown from each severed neck. Symbolically, this act represents one’s constant attempts to destroy the shadow instead of accepting it.
ANÁSHA - INTERVIEW WITH SEBASTIAAN FRANCO
In ‘Anásha’, Belgian photographer Sebastiaan Franco spent two years living with a Traveller family on their site in Finglas on the outskirts of Dublin. After spending a large amount of time with them, they gradually welcomed him into their community as one of them. In an interview with GUP, Franco reflects on his time with the Traveller family and his series which was additionally turned into a photobook.
ARTIST'S BODY - VICTORIA USHKANOVA
Victoria Ushkanova (Russia) is an autodidact photographer and media artist currently based in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Her main focus is portrait and fashion photography. In her project ‘Artist’s Body’, she explores the acceptance of the human body in the form of a video performance which later extends to her photographs.
Thomas Driesen (b.1988, Belgium) is an autodidact artist and an advocate of smartphone photography. All his photographic series are made with support of his phone. Herewith presented is selection of his work with the recurring themes of legs, light and Driesen's love for Brussels.
Wen Roks (b.1971, the Netherlands) studied and observed her own 16-year old daughter for one full year. In ‘SIXTEEN’, a series of black and white photos, Roks captured her daughter transforming from being a child into a young adult woman.
Roks also created another body of work ‘CONNECT’, for which she followed a group of young teenagers to a small lake at the border between Germany and the Netherlands. They spent most of the warm summer evenings around a lake and a forest where it was impossible to use any mobile devices. Instead, the group was swimming and relaxing on the shore, in close relation to each other and their surrounding nature.
Over.State is the first photographic project from Ilias Georgiadis (1990, Greece). It is a personal story of a young and lost person who is searching for freedom and love - an effort to explain the human condition of expressing intimacy, closeness and freedom.
"I feel a strange sense of melancholy when I look at my photographs. As if they represent moments that I did not necessarily experience, distant moments, which generate contrasting emotions, oscillating between my present and my past." Marta Blue (b. 1985, Italy) specialises in self-portraiture, she studies the body and how it interacts with the environment as a continuous search on herself.
SWIMMING CLASS AND JUNGLE BEES
Jurre Rompa (The Netherlands, 1990) grew up in Amsterdam and is specialized in portrait and documentary photography. Here he worked for a dutch film distributor and then moved to the island of Zanzibar for six months where he started his career as a photographer. He started his own photography practice as an autodidact and creates images that are personal, colorful and beautiful.
ANGELO BONETTI - HE GREW UP IN THE FOG
Angelo Bonetti (1976, Turin) is an Italian visual artist; a self-taught photographer who over the years has pursued and developed his own language. Bonetti creates works that generate different contents, associations and meanings that come into conflict. Space becomes time and language becomes image. His works have a strong vision in the approach to life and its everyday life, a continuous interest in what surrounds him, deepening themes such as memory, time and the connections of his personal stories, questioning the conditions of appearance of images, representations and ideas in the context of the contemporary visual culture in which they normally work.
JULIA ALBRECHT - DIAGNOSED WITH PHANTOM PAIN
Julia Albrecht (b. 1992) is a German-born fine art photographer. Her work examines the link between sociological and gender-scientific research and an intensive preoccupation with personal experiences. Her practice constantly draws from a profound curiosity for humanitarian issues and cultural phenomenons. In her series “Diagnosed with phantom pain”, she touches the realms of life's paradoxical. Through the camera, she vividly tries to reach the mind and explore the depths of life and its emotions.
With her latest project, “Sana Sana”, Rosa Lacavalla (b. 1993, Italy) documents her journey towards inner healing (healing that comes from the inside to the outside) and the slow and delicate process of recovery from emotional wounds. The series is named after a popular song that, in Spanish speaking countries, mothers sing to their children to calm them when they are hurt.
WING KA HO JIMMI - SO CLOSE AND YET SO FAR AWAY
Wing Ka Ho Jimmi (b. 1993) is a photographer, based between Hong Kong and the UK. In his latest project, “So close and yet so far away”, Jimmi works with the personal as political and explores his self-identity and how it relates to the socio-political situation of Hong Kong. Through classic portraiture and landscape photography, Jimmi examines the aftermath of the Handover agreement between Britain and China in 1997 and how it has impacted Hong Kong and its society.
ANGELO FORMATO - THE WOMEN OF MY LIFE
Angelo Formato (b. 1989) was born and raised in the town of Naples in southern Italy. Inspired equally by his vision of femininity and the use of creative styling, he portrays interesting characters with natural light and a pure photographic approach. Formato owes a lot of his inspiration to his family, who had a big influence on his work and shaped him both as a person and an artist. He has worked for multiple international clients and publications such as Vogue, Elle and Document Journal.
Sara Meinz (b. 1996, Spain) is a young photographer temporarily based in Galicia, Spain, where she grew up. With a background in cinematography, her body of work is rich in colours, candid and playful, and has the unique tenderness of a fresh gaze.
Àsìkò is a British-Nigerian photographer whose artistic work reflects an ongoing exploration of his multi-layered cultural heritage, encompassing ideas of tradition, spirituality and gender, and manifests in highly conceptual photographs that interweave elements of fantasy and realism. His 2018 body of work, entitled "Conversations", stems from a personal desire to investigate the history and emotional repercussions of FGM (female genital mutilation). The resulting images are powerful celebrations of the Black female body, combining a compositional simplicity with ornamental flowers and jewellery that suggest an expressive and symbolic significance.
Christelle Boulé's ongoing project Botanica takes us into a kaleidoscopic world inspired by forms of nature, rooted in the traditions of the botanical archive and brought to life through the technique of the photogram. The vast collection of flora housed within the Botanical Gardens of Montpellier is the source of Boulé's colourful images; it is France's oldest botanical garden, and its six kilometer archive of some 2,600 different species of plant both alive and extinct became the basis of Boulé's personal botanical archive: a renewed preservation and admiration for the wondrous, multitudinous contours and shapes of flowers and plants.
Emma Nica’s works focus on the inner reality of the psyche, in a time characterised by a growing number of disenchanted individuals. Her visual stories juxtapose childhood innocence and playfulness against melancholia. She tends to combine documentary photography with performance - giving the work a more expressive and heightened feeling. What fascinates her in performance is its power to show the non-verbal communication of human bodies.
REMEMBER HOW THEY TOLD US NEVER TO LOOK DIRECTLY INTO THE SUN - ANAÏS LESY
Anaïs Lesy's (b. 1995, Belgium) newest photographic series “Remember how they told us never to look directly into the sun” and the publication of the same name, takes the viewer on a journey thought mysterious landscapes and intriguing characters. Lesy started the project by collecting various objects found in nature. Step by step the work became a narration thought the complicated relationship humans have with nature. Despite needing each other in order to survive the human ways of living seems to disregard nature and the environment.
Linda Zhengová (b. 1995) is a photographer from the Czech Republic currently living and working in The Netherlands. Earlier this year, Zhengová graduated from a Photography BA at the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague. In the graduation series ‘Catharsis’, Zhengová explores the notion of her suppressed childhood trauma. The long-term project entails a photographic installation and a publication.
Celine Croze (b. 1982, Morocco) is a visual artist based in Paris. Sensitive to the cracks that our society is going through, Croze uses her background in cinema and fictional writing to transgress the world she’s looking at.
THE LAIUS COMPLEX - MEINDERT PEIRENS
In his ongoing series ‘The Laius Complex’, Meindert Peirens (b. 1986, Belgium) explores the notion of contemporary fatherhood. When becoming a father himself, he noticed how the emotions and struggles he experienced himself differed from those of his partner. On his journey of parenthood, Peirens even crossed paths with depression and as a result, he lost both his job and a connection with the mother of his son.
THE SECRET GARDENS - MARCO DEL ZOTTO
In ‘The Secret Gardens’, Marco Del Zotto is exploring familiar places, some even a few meters from his home in Venice, Italy, and his ability to still get lost in them. By highlighting some elements while obscuring others, he investigates the meaning of places and their permanence. Del Zotto’s imagery highlighted with lack of people encourages a playful approach where the viewer adopts the role of a detective, in search for narratives and certain clues.
LUNAR DAYS - INTERVIEW WITH CHRISTIAN ARTS
Christian Arts graduated from Fotoacademie Amsterdam and his latest project ‘Lunar Days’ is inspired by space travelling that the artist always dreamt about. His work is, therefore, strongly autobiographic. It's a mixture of Arts' vivid dreams, childhood memories, and hallucinations. By bringing his past experiences into the present, he creates his own strange new world that is reminiscent of a journey to the roots of his psyche. In an interview with GUP, Arts discloses his way of working as a photographer and the details behind ‘Lunar Days’.
In ‘Fallen’ Hanlu Gong (b. 1998, China) explores the notion of the void and searches for meaning in the meaningless, using the medium of photography to get a glance and experience her life from a third perspective. Her imagery has a strong diaristic quality, capturing Gong herself alongside her surroundings. These snapshots allow us to encounter infatuation, pain and curiosity.
INUIT HAVE NO WORD FOR FUTURE - INTERVIEW WITH NIKOLAI FRERICHS
Nikolai Frerichs is a photographer based in Hamburg, Germany. In his series ‘Inuit Have no Word for Future’ that he photographed in east Greenland's capital Tasiilaq, Frerichs communicates the disappearance of the cultural identity of the Inuit due to climate change, tourism and the promises of the western lifestyle. In this interview, Frerichs discloses the details of his photographic journey to Greenland and his photographs.
COLD LOVE & CORDILLERAS: INTERVIEW WITH CAROLINA ECHEVERRI
Carolina Echeverri (Denmark/Colombia) grew up in the Colombian “cordilleras” (mountain ranges), surrounded by thousand shades of greens and patters defining her location, time and weather. In ‘Under the Sheets’, she mirrors both the security and danger that the natural beauty represents.
In another project, ‘Cold Love/Rapture’, she reflects on her strict upbringing in the Catholic-Colombian environment. Particularly, the repressed sexuality as locally promoted; the surrounding passion, sensuality and eroticism are considered as a sin in that society.
HEROIN DAYS: AN INTERVIEW WITH YANNICK FORNACCIARI
Yannick Fornacciari is a self-trained photographer based in Montréal, Canada, who narrates his three-year heroin addiction. He graduated in clinical psychology and psychoanalytic psychopathology in Marseille and only by working as a psychologist he started to question the possibility of becoming a photographer. Known for his singular approach of analogue methods and black & white photographs, his work differentiates itself by its head-on raw and sensitive approach to intimacy and portraiture. In this interview with Fresh Eyes, Fornacciari reveals his photographic journey of addiction and transformation.
FICTIONS BASED ON TRUTH: AN INTERVIEW WITH EVELYN BENCICOVA
Evelyn Bencicova (b. Bratislava, 1992) is a visual creative specialising in photography and art direction. Informed by her background in fine art and new media studies (University for Applied Arts, Vienna), Bencicova’s practice combines her interest in contemporary culture with academic research to create a unique aesthetic space in which the conceptual meets the visual.
In the series Sole Harlem, Louise Amelie (Germany, 1991) and Aljaž Fuis (Germany) show the neighborhood of Harlem - only and purely Harlem. The series is the result of a year of living in and walking around this New York neighborhood. Everything you see in the photographs is Harlem: the buildings, the streets and all the people.
PANOS CHARALAMPIDIS & MARY CHAIRETAKI
Greek artist duo Panos Charalampidis and Mary Chairetaki (b. 1974) are included in the first edition of FRESH EYES: a catalogue initiated by GUP featuring 100 of the most talented European photographers currently in the first stage of their career. We asked them about their work in progress, but we're also curious about Cornucopia, a selection from which is included in FRESH EYES.
CELESTE KNIRKE ARNSTEDT - WHAT DOES POSSESSION MEAN TO YOU?
Celeste Knirke Arnstedt (b.1995) is a Danish artist based between Copenhagen and Gothenburg. Her works imitate popular cultural tendencies while reflecting on and exploring things that already exist. In her project “What does possession mean to you?”, she reflects on the matter of belongings. Working with recognizable objects, contemporary trends and familiar scenarios, Arnstedt examines how single images relate to each other through sequencing.
SOFIE FLINTH - A MILLION DOLLAR VIEW
In her series “A Million Dollar View”, Sofie Flinth (b. 1996, Denmark) follows the life of 73-year-old Henny during her love affair, capturing her new present. Henny lives alone with her dog Bella – her husband passed away five years ago. Together, she and her husband had moved to the small town Zandvoort on the west coast of the Netherlands, because of the apartment's "million dollar ocean view".
Jesaja Hizkia (b. 1987, The Netherlands) studied graphic design in Amsterdam. It was only after graduating that he started to develop an interest in photography. Even without formal training, he clearly has an eye for the graphic qualities of the scenes he encounters, and his design skills have helped him to produce superior – and unique – imagery at a relatively early point in his career. Hizkia is a highly creative artist who successfully integrates elements of composition, layout, balance, rhythm and colour in his autonomously produced photographic work. Currently, he is in the process of gaining more experience in both commissioned and personal projects.
Giacomo Bianco (b. 1994) is an Italian photographer who lives and works between Venice and Milan. He recently graduated from ISIA U with a MA in Photography and is currently the assistant of contemporary photographer Giovanna Silva with whom he also teaches at his former university. His photographic practice derives from the exploration of the natural world, particularly from observing the dynamics of coexistence between human and non-human living beings.
MICHELLE PIERGOELAM - THE UNTANGLED TALES
During this year, FRESH EYES talent Michelle Piergoelam (b. 1997, the Netherlands) has been granted second place by the Zilveren Camera Price for Storytelling, and the SO Award for her series “The Untangled Tales”, a project focusing on the story of Anansi and the Angisa-folders in addition to ways in which these traditions allow us to learn about the history of the slavery years in Suriname.
In a conversation with FRESH EYES, Michelle tells us more about her project.
ELIZABETH ALDERLIESTEN - WANDER
Shadowy landscapes, trees and figures are conjured forth like apparitions in the photographs of Elizabeth Alderliesten's series "Wander", in which the artist explores how the meandering and intuitive mind navigates the spiritual aspects of the time-based act of photography. Employing a narrow and detail-focused framing in her photography, Alderliesten studies her micro-subjects — be it a hand brushing lightly against cloth, or a shadowy, almost imperceptible tree — and transforms them into "free and poetic visual rhymes" that seek to encapsulate the emotions of the artist throughout each stage of the act of image-making.
KATERINA MOTYLEVA - MY ANNEXED FAMILY
In 2014, following the events of the Ukranian Revolution and the self-proclaimed independence of the Luhansk and Donetsk People's Republics by pro-Russian separatists, an imminent armed conflict broke out in Eastern Ukraine, the remnants of which continue to this day. Photographer Katerina Motyleva (b. 1988, Ukraine) grew up on the outskirts of Luhansk just thirty kilometers from the border between Russia and Ukraine, and is one of many within the region whose lives have been irrevocably marked by the repercussions of this ongoing military conflict.
ALICE DE KRUIJS - PARADISE ISLAND
Alice de Kruijs (b. 1981 The Netherlands) is a storytelling photographer focusing on the subjects of identity and diversity. De Kruijs’s bodies of work aim to go against the cultural and ethnic stereotypes. In 2019 De Kruijs was selected as one of the Fresh Eyes talents.
Here, in conversation with the Fresh Eyes editor, Alice is shortly discussing her most recent project: “Paradise Island”, a conceptual photography series about the conditions of living on the Pacific Islands in risk of extinction due to the global warming.
CHRISTINE MOOIJER - UNDER PRESSURE
When studying the images of Dutch photographer Christine Mooijer's latest project, Under Pressure, the German word Weltschmerz comes to mind — the term, coined by German writer Jean Paul in his 1827 book Selina and thereafter utilized by a diverse group of writers, embodies the feeling of personal inadequacy that stems from an acute awareness of the inadequacy of the world at large.
AN INSUFFICIENT RESPONSE - CARLOS BARRADAS
Carlos Barradas is a Portuguese photographer currently living and working in Madrid, Spain. He holds a Ph.D. in Anthropology as well as a MA in Contemporary Photography.
His entire body of work engages with the concept of ambiguity. Barradas positions his photographs in a liminal state - an anthropological concept that refers to an intermediate phase or condition in a given rite of passage.
LUCIA SEKERKOVÁ BLÁHOVÁ - VRĂJITOARE
Lucia Sekerková Bláhová (b. 1991, Slovakia) photographed the “vrăjitoare”, or witches, of Romania’s Wallachian Roma community. She collaborated with ethnologist Ivana Šusterová, an expert in the everyday life and culture of the Roma community. Together, they documented how ancient traditions have transitioned into the modern world through savvy social media promotion and live-streamed rituals.
Cecilie Fang (b. 1999, Denmark) is a photographer raised between Beijing (China) and Randers, (Denmark), currently living and working in The Netherlands. Her work explores identities and inner struggles that reflect the physical environment.
Lotte Ekkel (b. 1988, The Netherlands) is an autodidact photographer based in Amsterdam. The experience of working with vintage as well as contemporary photography for the past years, gave her tools, to not only look at what’s around her but also see and acknowledge it by the use of her photographic lens. Over the years, Ekkel trained her eye to capture the mundane in the most intriguing and poetic ways.
WHEN THE MOUNTAIN TOOK THE PLACE OF MY FATHER - VICTOIRE EOUZAN
With the project ‘When the Mountain took the Place of my Father’, the French artist and photographer Victoire Eouzan (b. 1992) gives tribute to her late father through the personification of mountains.
ON PORTRAITURE - INTERVIEW WITH ANNA PERGER
Anna Perger is a Dutch autodidact photographer from Nijmegen, The Netherlands. Perger unfolds the depth of ideals that are cultivated by upbringing and imposed by society. Tapping from her own personal history, Perger sometimes feels restricted in the way she is forced to fit into this world. By shedding prejudices and denying the normal, she has the desire to search for the primitive being or child that resides in herself and others. In an interview with GUP, Perger talks about portraiture and her way of working as a photographer.
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TANGLED BRANCHES - ALIZÉE BAUER
In her series ‘Tangled Branches’, Alizée Bauer (b. 1996, France) follows her grandfather on a hunt in South Africa. After such an encounter, Bauer started to question the values advocated by her family and those of herself. The work explores the violent contradictions that mingle between hunting scenes and Bauer’s inner views. Highlighted with a carnal colour palette, her photographs capture nature that is the target of both Bauer’s lens and of her grandfather’s gun.
SILENT LOSS - INTERVIEW WITH ILONA LANGBROEK
Ilona Langbroek (b.1970, the Netherlands) is a recent graduate from the Fotoacademie in Amsterdam. By means of her images she attempts to visualise the bond between man, spirit and nature.
‘Silent Loss’ deals with the emotions of loss and sadness of a generation forced to leave the former Dutch-Indies. In this interview with GUP, Langbroek discloses the details of her project and her point of view as a photographer.
INTERVIEW WITH VERONIKA ČECHMÁNKOVÁ
Veronika Čechmánková (Czechia) has graduated as a photography student from Film and TV School of the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague. She does not necessarily photograph subjects with clear intentions but rather captures what she recognizes to be important at a particular moment: “I think that randomness and spontaneity are instincts that should get triggered in you when you decide to become part of your third eye.”
UN AMORE IDEALE - CARMINE ROMANO
In ‘Un Amore Ideale’ (‘An Ideal Love’) Carmine Romano (Italy) addresses the Femminielli community in Naples. ‘Femminielli’ is a term used locally to refer to a population of homosexual males with markedly feminine gender expression. The (traditional) Neapolitan popular belief is that Femminielli are a symbol of luck, making them well integrated in society. The concept, however, overlaps with the notions of “gay” and “trans-people” which confounds Western gender categorization as a result.
IT MUST BE BUILT FROM ASHES: AN INTERVIEW WITH JUSTIN KEENE
In his Cape Town based project, ‘It Must Be Built From Ashes’, Justin Keene (b. 1989, The UK) challenges the mainstream media portrayal of Mitchells Plain and the Cape Flats, creating an intimate social dialogue with communities and their youth. The project evaluates the notion of citizenship and place-related identity by exploring themes of urban development and displacement – creating a renewed visual economy for the area and its people.